‘Red Dawn’ remake panders to political correctness and Chinese censorship

.The original 1984 version of “Red Dawn,” depicting a Soviet-led communist invasion of the United States, has been a conservative classic now for decades. But political correctness has rendered the remake of this classic downright farcical.

While Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen stood in good old-fashioned Americana standing up for American defiance against tyranny. The new version simply falls apart due to the filmmakers’ desire to be politically correct.

North Korea stands in for the long-gone Soviet Union in the remake, invading the Pacific Northwest. The communist state lacks the ability to pose any sort of threat to the mainland United States.

The political correctness lies in the fact China originally was the intended villain in the film and that the filmmakers substituted the North Koreans for the Chinese in postproduction to pander to China’s film market.

Chinese emblems were digitally replaced by those of China’s weaker neighbor, North Korea, to avoid giving offense to Chinese censors, as was the dialog.

China would have at least been a fanciful, although plausible adversary in the remake due to the film’s premise that the economic crisis left the United States open to invasion. China’s expanding military and economic might at least would have made their invading the United States believable.

The Los Angeles Times reported in July that Chinese censorship has gradually expanded into Hollywood, leading to the writing out of Chinese villains for fear of offending the Chinese Communist Party’s censors.

“A screenwriter on another Hollywood tentpole was told by the studio to steer clear of any Chinese villains in shaping his script,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The net effect is a situation that movie-business veterans say is unprecedented: The suppressive tendencies of a foreign nation are altering what is seen not just in one country but around the world.”

Why should Americans allow an imperialistic global power to dictate how we use our free speech in our entertainment? As a child of the ’80s, I miss the candor Hollywood used in the Cold War to describe our communist adversaries.